After releasing her second stand-up special in 2019, Michelle Wolf returns to the streaming giant with a three-episode, five-segment series, filmed at various comedy clubs across America. It’s a departure from the normal stand-up comedy special, but perhaps more in tune with how viewers watch comedy online in 2023.
The Gist: Wolf’s on-air career began as a writer/performer in late-night, first with Late Night with Seth Meyers and then The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Her debut stand-up hour, Nice Lady, premiered on HBO in 2017; her second, Joke Show, for Netflix two years later. In between, she starred in her own Netflix variety sketch series, The Break with Michelle Wolf, and delivered the keynote address at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner, where her remarks so upset conservative Republicans that the White House Correspondents Association hired a historian the following year instead of a comedian.
Her return to Netflix now is remarkable for multiple reasons: 1) she self-financed, produced and edited her project first before licensing it to Netflix, and 2) it’s not packaged as an hour, but rather as three episodes containing five segments in total, “New Neighborhood,” “All Struggles Matter + Me Too” and “News to Me + All Beautiful,” for a full running time of 77 minutes. An opening montage features Wolf telling comedy club audiences “It’s great to be here” in so many words at Philadelphia’s Helium Comedy Club, Denver’s Comedy Works Downtown, Salt Lake City’s Wiseguys Comedy Club, and Madison’s Comedy On State.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: By format, this won’t remind you of anything, per se. By subject matter, Wolf stands somewhere on the spectrum between the sexually explicit feminism of Nikki Glaser and the defiance of Dave Chappelle.
Memorable Jokes: Let’s focus just on the first episode, “New Neighborhood,” which sets the scene for her performance in Madison by revealing to the audience that Wolf has relocated to Spain, specifically Barcelona. That allows her not only to have a new perspective on what’s happening here in America, but also provides her with easy foreign fodder to share with American audiences.
Take her first observation about Barcelona, for example: “It’s a beach city, but it’s also a bit of a gay city. I think that’s why they have the lisp.”
The city’s embrace of nude beaches affords opportunities to poke fun at public displays of penises and boobs in all shapes and sizes, and Wolf makes light not only of the older, out-of-shape men on the sand, but also her friend, who Wolf says takes offense to having her breast implants called fakes. To which she turns the audience’s reaction about fake breasts against them, quipping: “OK, good, so we’re all a bit transphobic.” Assessing the audience, she adds: “That’s a fun social experiment,” and a few moments later with: “I know, you all feel like I got you, didn’t you? Well, I did. That’s why.”
But then it’s back to the beach, where Wolf describes the difference between the heterosexual nude beach and the gay men’s nude beach akin to that “between a dog park and a dog show,” and imagines a lesbian nude beach would therefore feel more like a “dog rescue.”
It’s lesbians who fascinate Wolf most. She feels they’d make better friends to straight women than gay men, they don’t need men to thrive and survive, but most of all, because she’s “jealous of the lesbian relationship,” whose power dynamics mystify her. In her own words, she believes lesbian couples get to be both have a wife and be a wife. Whereas in her own life, where she reveals to us that she moved to Barcelona “for a boy,” which has her doing things she never enjoyed doing before even for herself, such as cooking and doing laundry. “Being in love and being happy is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Even worse, it turns out, than mockingly referring to her genitalia as garbage in a joke about their sex life. Wolf peels back the curtain, so to speak, to tell us she riffed this bit one night onstage, and loved it despite the fact that it demeans her in the process. “I’d rather keep calling my vagina a trash can, than not do that joke.”
Our Take: And that’s the thing about Wolf. She puts the effectiveness of the joke above most all else.
Which goes a long way in explaining why she tells the jokes she does, and why she decided to present them separated in this way as five shorter segments. Although they’re presented as individually titled routines, they do all hold together thematically as observations about the current state of white women in America.
Wolf’s teasing the audience over trans jokes (in the second episode, she also makes a point of questioning how many trans women are murdered for being trans versus for being new and inexperienced at navigating a dangerous world for women as women) feels like her way of indirectly or subtly adding her two cents to the debate over Dave Chappelle’s obsession with trans jokes, but doing so decidedly on her own terms as a comedian. Before she moved to Barcelona, Wolf had spent her pandemic lockdown in quarantine at Chappelle’s home in Ohio, so she had a front-row seat to witness all of the blowback against him in recent years.
And Wolf’s decision to divvy up her material into individual chunks speaks not only to how we watch comedy now online — consuming it not by hours, but in short quick bites (RIP Quibi!) via clips, cropped vertically on TikToks, IG Reels and YouTube Shorts — as well by how American stand-up comedians build their hours to begin with, five to 15 minutes at a time.
So it makes sense in a way for Wolf to present her comedy this way, because cutting the material down from 77 minutes to an hour would be tough, and since there are no segues to pull it all together, she’d have to go even longer for one shot.
Wolf told The Hollywood Reporter:“I wanted to do something different than a traditional special and make something on my own terms. It’s hard to convince the industry to give you money to do something new. So, I made it on my own in hopes I’d be able to sell it. I shot eight episodes and we ended up with five of them combined into three. Sounds complicated. Don’t think about it. Just watch. I’m hoping people like this short, digestible format. If so, I have three episodes in the vault and more ready to tape.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Netflix buy those up fairly quickly, too.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Precisely because Wolf chose to split up her new material into multiple episodes, you’re much more likely to want to watch the first 20 minutes so you can decide for yourself whether you want more where that came from.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.